NEW YORK (TIP): Indian American software engineer ‘Palani Kumananat’ of the Wall Street Journal  won (shared) this year’s Pulitzer Prize for graphics team of investigative journalism, in growing recognition of the importance of using IT tools in reporting. 

Palani Kumanan, who is a software architect with  Dow Jones that publishes the Wall Street Journal, was a part of the winning project’s graphics team. 

The Journal won the top journalism award announced on Monday for its mammoth investigative project, “Medicare Unmasked.” 

Palani co-authored a series of articles that exposed systematic corruption within the Medicare system.

He shared the prize along with members of the Journal’s graphics team Martin Burch, Chris Canipe, Madeline Farbman, Jon Keegan and Stuart Thompson. 

“Congrats to the great team at the WSJ! —  Wall Street Journal wins Pulitzer Prize for ‘Medicare Unmasked’ @WSJ,” tweeted  Michael Siconolfi, the newspaper’s investigations editor. 

Kumanan, a graduate of the PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, developed the interactive database on  Medicare billing used to analyse government payments made to over 880,000 medical service providers, including doctors and hospitals.